Nelson and Murdock
by pseudonymitous
Summary: Foggy and Matt one-shots, as they go from law students to the best avocados in New York. UPDATED: Ch. 3 "Clavado En Un Bar"
1. Vinyl

There's a lot of conversation and debate on Tumblr about the details of Matt Murdock's blindness. This is my take on my favorite theories. Please remember that these stories exist in the world of the show and not necessarily the comics. Please read and review!

* * *

 _It's an evil wind that blows no good, yeah... It's a sad heart that won't love like I know it should..._

Matt lay back on his bed, hands folded behind his head, with the Aretha Franklin record spinning on the dresser. The music swelled, filling the room, drowning out all the other sounds of student housing. His roommate was out with some girl, Allie or Elsie or whatever, and Matt had the place to himself.

Few sounds were robust enough to drown out background noise, and they were almost exclusively produced by vinyl records. The crackling, popping, and hissing noises the player produced provided a baseline, a kind of white noise against the city; the whirring sound a record made once it began to spin provided a second layer, killing the sounds of electronics in his room and the neighbors upstairs. If he turned the music up loud enough, Matt could drown out his own thoughts and heartbeat. It was a welcome change.

His blindness was hard to explain- the "world on fire" analogy only worked to a certain point. He knew for a fact that an MRI would insist he had some vision; that part of his brain was stimulated to the point that he could make things out in front of and around him, but the truth was that his eyes didn't work at all. His field of vision was at 0%. The combination of surroundings that led to his "impressionistic painting" of the world were compiled by taste, smell, touch, and sound. This meant it didn't matter whether his eyes were open or closed; the only time he could escape a picture of his surroundings was when he was unconscious. He didn't even have to be looking at a thing to "see" it, which gave him an unusually complete and frankly overstimulating image of the world.

Laying there, listening to that record at full blast, Matt got a rare glimpse of peace and quiet. His sense of the air in the room- heat rising, the smell of a neighbor's dinner, swirled about him like a Van Gogh night scape, an abstract peace. He transcended his usual relaxation and floated into a place of true quiet.

In spite of what Stick had taught him, or maybe because of it, Matt's life was particularly exhausting. Did he really need the cane? Not if he focused. But that counted him out of so many things- walking and talking was particularly difficult, for instance. Tuning out, focusing, isolated him in the world. The whole picture required use of his whole brain. Sometimes he just didn't have that during the day.

Matt debated explaining this to his new roommate, and ultimately decided against it. In the month they'd lived together, they'd become fast friends. Foggy was a little heavy-footed, with long hair that brushed his shoulders and a deep and abiding love for the band Phish. He was unlike anyone Matt met in undergrad (though, after a decade in an orphanage, he'd jumped at the idea of a single room), immediately helpful and excitable. It was nice to have someone who grew up in Hell's Kitchen with him in the Ivy League. Foggy was a scholarship kid, unafraid to tell pompous daddy's boys to get over themselves. He studied hard and played harder. He was in the habit of explaining other people's nonverbals (shrugging, winking, waving), and Matt knew that if he told him about the whole sensing-air-currents echolocation thing, he wouldn't understand.

Matt had never had a friend like Foggy. Not ever, even once in his life. Matt spent his life holding things back, while Foggy lived in a world of broad self-disclosure. Matt didn't need another cold acquaintance; he liked Foggy and his enthusiasm.

He'd explain his talents to Foggy eventually. He'd just wait until they knew one another a little bit better.


	2. Face Feeling & Voir Dire

"Dude."

Foggy's voice cut through Matt's noise-cancelling headphones and overpowered the words on the page in front of him. Matt slipped off the headphones and let them fall around his neck.

"Is it about _voir dire?"_ Matt asked, his tone admittedly snappish. "Because I'm a little bit attached to _voir dire_ right now."

"Have you ever felt someone's face?" Foggy asked the question quickly, but seriously enough that Matt wondered if he'd been in the pot brownies again. "You know, to see what they look like?"

Matt frowned, leaving a finger on the book so he wouldn't lose his place. "Objection; relevancy?"

"Just curious," Foggy said.

Matt sighed. "Serious question? You're not messing with me?"

"No way, man. Swear to God."

Matt grabbed a sticky note, placed it under the line where his finger rested, and closed the book.

"The face-feeling thing is mostly a myth," he said, as if rehearsed.

"So you've never done it?" Foggy asked.

Matt tried to fight the smile that was presently spreading across his face. "Uh... I didn't say that."

Foggy scrambled across the bed, bouncing across the mattress until he and Matt were almost face-to-face. "You _have_ done it."

"Once," Matt said firmly. "And I did it..."

He paused dramatically, knowing Foggy was waiting with bated breath.

"...To get laid."

Foggy cracked up laughing, his reaction so animated that Matt couldn't help but grin.

"That makes so much sense," Foggy said between gasping laughs.

"The majority of people find face-feeling creepy," Matt said. They were both laughing, now. "I don't get why everyone thinks blind people are the exception."

"I don't know, man, I'm just trying to be a friend."

"If you were trying to be a friend, you'd pick your damned socks up off the middle of the floor," Matt teased. "Or clean all that hair out of the shower drain. I mean, for God's sake..."

"Whoa. Nobody's perfect."

"Can I get back to my jury procedures, or-?"

Foggy made a few noncommittal noises, and Matt heard him return to his laptop. There were a few beats of silence before he spoke again.

"Matt?"

"Yeah?"

"Can you do me a favor?"

"I'm not feeling your face."

"Fair enough."


	3. Clavado En Un Bar

"Where'd you do your undergrad?" Foggy inquired over burgers in a just-off-campus tavern.

"St. John's," Matt said, wiping his greasy fingers on a napkin.

"St. John's? You play sports or something?"

"Yeah," Matt deadpanned. "All-American sharp-shooter."

"Oh, my God," Foggy groaned. "It's just... it's a big sports school, y'know?"

Matt was laughing harder now. "I'm sure the MLB is full of blind hitters."

"I do pride myself on my open-mindedness." Foggy took a sip of beer and set the glass back down on the table. "Okay then, I gotta ask-"

"Do you really?"

"I really do. Queens or Staten Island campus?"

Matt groaned. "Staten Island."

"You went all the way out to Staten Island for your undergrad. What'd you major in, Axe Body Spray?"

"Actually, I majored in Criminal Justice," Matt said seriously. "I _minored_ in Axe Body Spray."

"And you lived over there and everything? Voluntarily?"

"You're giving me a lot of shit for someone who met me less than an hour ago."

"If I recall correctly, you welcomed it with open arms."

"The last time I welcomed something with open arms, I walked straight into it and chipped a tooth."

"Fair enough."

"So what about you?" Matt asked. "Where'd you go?"

"NYU," Foggy said. "I wanted to go to Chicago, but my ma freaked. It was cheaper if I lived at home anyway."

"You lived at home for your whole undergrad?"

"At least I didn't live on Staten Island," Foggy shot back. "How did we both grow up in Hell's Kitchen and never run into each other?"

"Well, you'd heard of me."

"Yeah, but our paths never crossed. What year'd you graduate?"

"From high school?" Matt asked. "Uh... '06."

"Weird. You go to public school?"

"No, I was privately educated."

"Your folks must've done okay for themselves."

Matt paused, licked his lips, debated how much of his story he was willing to tell right then. "Something like that."

"My old man runs a hardware store," Foggy said, snatching an onion ring off Matt's plate. "And it's like, you make your living selling screws, you have ten kids, and you wonder why you can't afford cable."

"Ten kids? Wow. Where do you fall in that order?"

"Sixth. I got two older brothers and three older sisters, then two of each below me."

"Sounds loud," Matt grimaced at the thought of growing up in a house like that.

"You got siblings?"

"I... grew up with other kids."

Foggy paused. Matt could practically hear the wheels turning in his head as he tried to process how this could be.

"Wait..."

"Orphanage," Matt quietly supplied. This was as far into his childhood as he was willing to go with this total stranger.

"Shit, man. I didn't mean to push."

"It's okay," Matt said, firmly. "Really."

"Listen, I'm stuffed," Foggy said, standing and pushing back his chair. "Let's go see what's going down back at the dorm?"

Matt extended his cane, and a hand to Foggy. "After you."


End file.
